In 2016, Offensive Security–the developer of Kali Linux ethical hacking distro–decided to switch to a rolling release model. However, from time to time, they keep releasing the Kali snapshots with all the latest patches, fixes, and updates. Following the same tradition, the developers have pushed the first snapshot for 2018.

Aptly named Kali Linux 2018.1, this release contains all the fixes and updates released since last November’s Kali 2017.3. The team faced challenges like Spectre and Meltdown exploits, whose patches can be found in Linux 4.15 kernel.

This release is powered by the new Linux 4.14.12 kernel, which brings support for newer hardware and improved performance. This will enable the ethical hackers and penetration testers to use Kali in a more efficient manner to safeguard the security.

Notable Kali 2018.1 features

2018.1 comes with the support for AMD Secure Memory Encryption. It’s a new feature of AMD processors that allows automatic DRAM encryption/decryption. This will, theoretically, prevent the machines from cold-boot attacks.

Kali 2018.1 also supports the increased memory limits. With kernel 4.14, the new CPUs will be able to support 128PB of virtual memory and 4PB of physical memory.

In case you’re running Hyper-V to run Kali VM images, there’s some more good news. In the new release, Hyper-V integration services are included, which support Network Monitoring, Replication, and Dynamic Memory.

Kali Linux 2018.1 update and download

It goes without saying that a number of packages have been updated. This list of updated tools includes reaver, dbeaver, seclist, zaproxy, burpsuite, etc.

In case you’re already running Kali, run this command to get all the updates:

apt update && apt full-upgrade

The brand new torrent and ISO files for Kali Linux 2018.1 can be found on this download page. The links for a pre-made ARM and VM images are also provided there.